The Petrified Forest

I read “The Petrified Forest,” by Robert Sherwood, for clues to its relevance to “Revolutionary Road,” and I’m glad I did, because, in many ways, the book is in constant dialogue with the play—echoing and mirroring its themes, imagery, and dialogue. While I agree that the Wheelers and others in their community are self-dramatizing “hollow men,” April did go to drama school, and I can see how the lead role’s resonance with her own history has infected her psyche and bled into her life, as well as the play’s relevance to the Oedipal attitudes of men like Frank and Shep, returning from the Second World War with questions about their masculinity.

For those who haven’t read “The Petrified Forest,” a speed-read synopsis:

The Black Mesa Bar-B-Q gas station and lunch room, home to three generations of the Maples family, “at a lonely crossroads in the eastern Arizona desert,” is where “The Petrified Forest” is set, in post-First World War, post-Russian Revolution, Depression America. Its wide windows look out onto the desert—an intimation of the Wheelers’ picture window, perhaps?

First lines of the play, spoken by a fed-up telegraph worker: “Certainly it’s a Revolution! And that’s exactly what we got to come to, whether a lot of old fluffs back east like it or not…”

Soon Gabby, the pretty daughter “with a certain amount of style” and “an odd look of resentment,” the part played by April in the Laurel Players production, comes in, reading the “Poems of François Villon” in English, a slim volume sent to her by her French mother, who, like April’s mother, abandoned her daughter and returned to France. Gabby’s dream is to go to Paris and learn French. A romantic English writer/gigolo (don’t ask) who once lived in France wanders in, and Gabby, indifferent to the local football hulk, sees in him a man of intellect. He tries to disabuse her of her fantasies, asking if she’s ever read “The Hollow Men” and advising her not to, explaining,

It refers to the intellectuals, who thought they’d conquered Nature. They dammed it up, and used its waters to irrigate the wastelands. They built streamlined monstrosities to penetrate its resistance. They wrapped it up in cellophane and sold it to drugstores…And now—do you know what’s causing world chaos?…It’s Nature hitting back…with strange instruments called neuroses. She’s deliberately afflicting mankind with the jitters….She’s taking the world away from the intellectuals and giving it back to the apes.

Gabby (undeterred): We could go to France, and you’d show me everything, all the cathedrals and the art—and explain everything. And you wouldn’t have to marry me, Alan. We’d just live in sin and have one hell of a time.

Squier: That’s a startling proposal, Gabrielle. I hadn’t expected to receive anything like it in this desert….

Gabby: Wouldn’t you like to be loved by me?

Gangsters on the lam, led by the manly Duke Mantee, take the place hostage. Those trapped include the Chisholms, a sort of composite of the Givingses. Mrs. Chisholm, an actress who suffered a nervous breakdown and married a dull guy from Dayton, warns Gabby, “Don’t let them stifle you with their talk about duty. Go to France—and find yourself!”

A shootout occurs. Alan martyrs himself so that Gabby can go to France with his life-insurance policy. Duke escapes over the border.

Even the word “whimsical” is in there somewhere.

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